Tobias Oetiker, the creator of MRTG and RRDTool, traveled from Switzerland to LISA this year for fun and to teach. He delivered an array of training courses and talks on some of his software that has become the de-facto standard for open source monitoring and graphing solutions.
In 1998 Oetiker came to LISA on a student grant and presented a paper on the Multi Router Traffic Grapher: http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa98/full_papers/oetiker/oetiker_html/oetiker.html.
I asked Tobias why he thought MRTG and RRDTool are so popular for powering most modern network and performance trending solutions? Oetiker explained that there were no network monitoring tools at the time that could trend and graph usage over time, so he had to write it himself.
MRTG grew in popularity and was being used for network monitoring but and for very unconventional uses such as trending wave size at the Scripps Pier in La Jolla, California.
RRDTool was created soon after MRTG to expand MRTG’s shortcoming of only accepting two data-sources. The idea behind RRDTool was to allow for a time-series database with the ability to create graphs. It is an all-in-one solution created specifically to solve the
Jordan Hubbard, Director of UNIX Technology at Apple gave a talk at LISA this year about OS X and how continues to come along as a robust, UNIX operating system. Many rare insights were revealed during the talk about recent developments powering the OS X operating system.
Some topics discussed was the process of converting OS X into a certified UNIX operating system, how file quarantine works, the lesser-known sandbox profile language which is based on FreeBSD Mandatory Access Control, code signing on all of the binaries and libraries of OS X, better programming language support (RubyCocoa, HotCocoa, and PyObjC), Apple Syslog, and ZFS.
The Apple Syslog (ASL) is a complete rewrite of syslog from the ground up. ASL offers a consistently encoded syslog format as welll as a Boolean search API. ASL is open source, available on macosforge.org, and not dependant on Apple technology.
In the talk ZFS was spoken about in Leopard. The current Apple implementation of ZFS is read-only, however there is a full read-write implementation on http://zfs.macosforge.org.
Hubbard’s talk was informative and exclusive and offered bits and pieces of information that otherwise would be unlikely to discover. The information presented at this talk gave some informative insights into Apple’s more silent innovations, as well as the more public vocal ones.
